Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

December 30, 2004

Video Blogging (vlogging for short) is the next thing so says a Business Week article cited in Paid Content.

"Welcome to the latest Net phenomenon: video blogs, or what some folks call vlogs. Thousands of ordinary (and some downright nutty) people have begun posting a cornucopia of video fare on line, from self-indulgent art clips and earnest citizen journalism to sly political commentary. Experimentation is the rule, and eccentrics outnumber serious practitioners."

I've highlighted the last words because if you go to vlog.org you will find yourself at the site of The Village Light Opera Group (VLOG) one of the oldest and one of the few New York City Gilbert and Sullivan acting troupes left. I recently had to attend a performance of Princess Ida that they put on to lend support to a work colleague of my girlfriend. The audience was indeed filled with eccentrics who outnumbered the practitioners. Given VLOG's need for funding I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising person tried to buy their URL.

December 29, 2004

Being left-handed this is of interest. I mostly thought it meant I couldn't use scissors. Is there a "Senior Boxing Championship?"

"Left-handed people thrive best in the most murderous societies, according to a study of tribes across the world. The discovery may help to answer the riddle of why a minority of left-handers persist in human populations.

Being a southpaw is an advantage in a host of confrontational situations. Lefties are far more common at the top of sports such as boxing and fencing than in normal society. The benefit comes from the element of surprise: most opponents will be less used to facing a left-handed adversary.

But left-handedness comes at a cost. Developmental experts think that stress during development or birth may divert the nervous system from its default, right-handed path. And developmental stress is also linked to reduced lifespan, low birthweight and increased incidence of immune and nervous disorders, meaning that natural selection might be expected to weed out lefties altogether."

December 27, 2004

James Surowiecki has an article in the MIT Technology Review Technology and Happinessthat looks at the the studies and writings on whether technology makes us happier. It's a mixed bag better to have it in many cases than not but perhaps it has little bearing on whether or not we are happy.

Another interesting article on the topic is in this month's Utne Reader Technoskeptic Techie in which Computer scientist David Levy thinks digital culture is damaging us at a deep level.

RealClimate is a blog about global warming and other related issues. Authored by scientists it is a site I'll be looking at often. Right now there is a dialog about recent statements by Michael Crichton about global warming.

December 22, 2004

Another thing to do for the New Year is to confess, to get rid of bad thoughts (about people living in certain States) and sins, to clear the way for the next 12 months. This site comeclean.com which is featured in The NY Times business section is actually great. The article is about alternative "fun" marketing sites that companies are setting up to attract people to their brands. Plus if you are really a sinner you can visit every day without having to leave your desk.

I love lists. Since it's almost New Year's eve here is a fantastic tool to make some resolutions on Twinkler 43 Things . It is a new collaborative list tool now in preview. The font sizes of items change according to their popularity much as they do on Flickr tags. It's a great way to see that you are not alone. Put together by a team that is behind Amazon's personalization tools it should be something when it comes out.

December 02, 2004

For two and a half glorious years I worked at a new media publishing company called Voyager. Now it seems a time and place as remote as the deserted island on Myst. This was pre-web or at least pre-mosaic. Our medium was CD-ROMs, with their weird spelling and incredibly small capacity. I became interested in the company when they were still in California before they moved to New York when I saw a CD-ROM calledI Photograph to Remember. It was something new and in a way something very old. A photographer named Pedro Meyer had created a slide-show of photographs of his parents. It had an accompanying soundtrack in English and in Spanish. It also had navigation controls that remained hidden until a cursor was run down to the bottom of the screen. You could stop it and read text, you could navigate by year, and by subject. It was linear and non-linear. It was black and white, it was intimate, it was powerful and made people cry. Now people famously say the Internet doesn't make people cry well this did. It wasn't a book, it wasn't a film, it was something else entirely. It led to my working and creating "new media" as a producer for the past decade. For years now at various jobs and ventures I've been trying to go backward and instill the spirit of Voyager into the work I've been doing but now it is time to move forward and away from that.

Over the past few years it has felt at times that everything I've been involved with has been all about marketing and less the spirit of discovery that pulled me into the field and that has made me nostalgic for the brief window of the new that was Voyager.

This year as I worked with RiverKeeper and participated in MoveOn I began to feel flush with a new kind of excitement about the power and creative energy that the Internet is unlocking. I get my news from Blogs, I look at playlists on ITunes and I realize that I've been following the new for years. So I'm leaving the ghost of Voyager behind not so much to desert the spirit of invention that pulled me into the field but to rekindle it and begin looking and appreciating the new types of invention that are all around. And so I'm launching this blog.

I've set up blogs and used the technology for many sites including most recently Ron Suskind's for the book The Price of Loyalty but have never stepped up to the plate myself. I plan to cover emerging technology, trends, sites, and other things that catch my interest in my work as a consultant and creator of new digital products and hope that people will look into from time to time.